A New Crankshaft for V8 — Today we are introducing Crankshaft, a new compilation infrastructure for V8, Google Chrome's JavaScript engine. By using aggressive optimizations, Crankshaft dramatically improves the performance of compute-intensive JavaScriptapplications - often by more than a factor of two!

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths — WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks. — IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

Facebook: We're Not Kicking Wikileaks Off Our Site — Classified document publishing website Wikileaks has now been kicked off of Amazon, Paypal, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account - but it lives on, including across hundreds of mirrored sites and is the subject for widespread discussion on Facebook and Twitter.

MasterCard pulls plug on WikiLeaks payments — MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned. — “MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks …

Foxconn to ship iPad 2 by the end of February 2011 — Foxconn Electronics' (Hon Hai Precision Industry's) plants in Shenzhen, China have recently been notified they will ship Apple's iPad 2 within the next 100 days with initial shipments to reach 400,000-600,000 units, according to sources from Taiwan-based component makers.

WikiLeaks: British Police Arrest Assange — Andy Winter, Sky News Online — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested by British police over sexual assault claims in Sweden. … The 39-year-old Australian was detained by Scotland Yard officers at around 9.30am after he voluntarily went …

Google Nexus S preview — We're here at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco, and we've just had a chance to lay our ever-loving hands all over Google's latest wunderkind, the Nexus S. As you've probably already read and seen, the device is set to be the next flagship phone sporting a pure Google experience.

Amazon to demo Kindle for the Web on Tuesday — Demo is one day after Google announces eBooks; Battle shapes up between two Internet giants — Computerworld - Amazon plans to demonstrate a new version of Kindle for the Web on Tuesday, one day after Google launched its Google eBooks and eBookstore strategy.

IE9 and Privacy: Introducing Tracking Protection — The feedback and conversation on IE9's Platform Previews and Beta to date from many different communities has made the IE9 development process, and product, substantially better than previous releases. The discussions around hardware-accelerated HTML5 …

Google Books for Android — a Review — Google opened its e-book store and released a reader app for Android today. Google Books is a typical no-frills app — common with Google's usual first efforts — but it handles the basic tasks of an e-book reader well.

Introducing Apache Wave — One of the best outcomes from November's Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software.

iTunes sending out free movie rentals — Apple today started sending out free iTunes movie rental codes to many iTunes users. This seems to be random and we have no idea why they're doing this. Maybe to promote the rental service? People aren't renting enough movies?

Toshiba to launch 3 new tablet PCs in 1Q11 — Toshiba is aiming to launch three new tablet PCs in the first quarter of 2011 and has outsourced their production to its Taiwan-based partners Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics and Pegatron Technology. The three devices are already set to show …